Monthly Archives: January 2014

To help the jQuery Foundation accomplish its mission to improve the open web and make it accessible to everyone, we established a membership program where organizations and individuals could join the foundation to help us support our goals. In return, members are recognized both on our websites and at conferences. Since that time, a number of companies, large and small, as well as individuals, have stepped up to support the foundation and continued success of the jQuery projects. A full listing of our members is available on the member page on jquery.org.

Corporate Memberships

Corporate memberships are available in several levels based on support, ranging from Bronze to Platinum. Beyond those levels is our top level membership called our Founding members. Currently, WordPress is our single Founding member at this time and they are a huge part of the jQuery Foundation mission and we would like to say a special thank you to them. We would not be here if it wasn’t for the support of WordPress and our many corporate members at every level.

So what does a member get in return for their support of the Foundation? Depending on the level of support, there are a number of ways we recognize and thank our members. Every member is recognized on the member page. As you progress up through the different levels of membership, more benefits such as conference recognition, free and reduced price conference sponsorship packages, invitations to team meetings to discuss the development and direction of the jQuery projects, and even the ability to host jQuery licensed events of your own. For more information about the corporate membership program, e-mail us at [email protected].

I’m not a Corporation, how can I help?

We’re glad you asked. The jQuery Foundation also has an individual membership program where people can donate smaller amounts to help support the Foundation and in return, we send out some cool jQuery branded gear. When the program started, we offered three levels of membership for individuals. That just got too complicated for both the members joining as well as the folks managing the payment and gift fulfillment. There is now only one level of individual membership at the $400 per year level. If you think about it, that’s really only a little more than $1/day to help keep the jQuery Foundation running. You can see all of our individual members listed on the member page. As new members are added, they will be listed as Heroes until the transition from a 3-tier to 1-tier program is complete and everyone has merged into a single list of Individual Members. If all of this has got you itching to become part of the next wave of individual members, head on over to https://jquery.org/join/ and join our ranks.

Membership may not be an option for everyone, but there are still ways you can support the Foundation’s work. The first way is through donations. The jQuery Foundation accepts donations, both large and small, through PayPal. If that’s an option that interests you, check out our donate page. Another way to help the foundation is by grabbing yourself a nice shirt or some stickers over at DevSwag. We have partnered with DevSwag, as many other open source projects have, to license the sale of official jQuery branded clothing and other items and a portion of the proceeds from those items are donated to the jQuery Foundation.

No matter if you’re a company or an individual, we hope you’ll take the time to consider supporting the jQuery Foundation to keep us working toward making the web accessible to everyone.

One Last Thing …

We thought we would let you know one more time about the upcoming jQuery Conference in San Diego. The conference is February 12-13 and is preceded by Bocoup’s 2 day training conference Roost on February 10-11. Don’t forget to take $50 off your ticket to one or both of these events using discount code jqblog50 at checkout!

The other day, we posted about our new content workflow, but we didn’t get into how all that content is actually served. Believe it or not, jQuery doesn’t just run on jQuery.

The servers

The servers themselves are hosted at Media Temple. We have been using their VPS services for many years to host all the things we need to host, of which there are a surprising number. We use over a dozen different servers (of various sizes) hosting everything in the jQuery network including many different web sites, applications and services vital to the community and development team. The reliability of the Media Temple VPS services and network for our infrastructure has been fantastic.

The setup

We couldn’t manage all of the servers without Puppet. Puppet is a configuration management tool that makes it really easy to express server configuration in a simple scripting language. Tasks like adding a domain to the Nginx configuration can be annoying, and hard to track changes using conventional methods. Using Puppet lets us store all the server configuration needed in a git repository, and deploy new machines very easily.

Another product that really shines in our setup is Nginx. Nginx is an open source web server focused on delivering the best performance possible. On our busiest Media Temple Dedicated Virtual server around peak times, Nginx handles about 300 HTTP requests per second, of which about 30 are serving pages from WordPress via php-fpm. Nginx’s built in fastcgi_cache handles a lot of that load, and more like 2 or 3 requests per second actually make it to PHP.

Thanks for the support!

Keeping a network of servers running to support a community as large as jQuery’s is a big job. To help ensure everything runs smoothly, we rely on jQuery Infrastructure team members Adam Ulvi and Ryan Neufeld, and for server and network-related issues we count on prompt and helpful support from the Media Temple team.

To celebrate their 7 years of serving the jQuery community, Media Temple is extending a special offer on their VPS and Grid Hosting. For the next 5 days, get 50% off an annual purchase of a Grid or VPS (up to level 3) service with the code LovejQuery50.

Here in the eastern part of the United States, we’re huddling in subzero temperatures and dealing with the aftermath of a snowstorm. Still, there’s nothing to brighten our moods like the pristine beauty of a freshly fallen release–no, make that TWO releases. jQuery 1.11.0 and 2.1.0 are ready to keep you warm on these dark winter nights.

You can get the files off our CDN as always, and either use them directly or download them to your own server. Our download page has all the files and information you need, including pointers to the other CDNs that carry the files. Just give those folks a few days to update!

For those of you not following along for a while, both the 1.x and 2.x branches of jQuery support all recent modern browsers and have the same API. The 1.x branch, this time 1.11.0, adds support for the older versions of Internet Explorer (IE6, 7, and 8). The 2.x branch, today played by 2.1.0, adds support for non-traditional web environments like node.js and browser plugins for Chrome and Firefox.

jQuery went through a major house-cleaning with the 1.9 release that removed some features. If you haven’t yet moved from an earlier version, see the jQuery 1.9 Upgrade Guide and let the jQuery Migrate plugin do all the heavy lifting for you.

What’s New?

You may be wondering what great new things await you in these releases. Perhaps you’re fearing that they hold a bunch of breaking changes. You just know the project lead will suggest updating things right now. There goes your whole damn week and that trip to Florida. Well fear not! We’ve fixed quite a few bugs, but the other features and changes are mainly organizational ones that don’t affect the behavior of APIs. Your code shouldn’t break, it should just run a little faster. Here are the highlights:

Fewer forced layouts: In this release we declared war on places where we might inadvertently force the browser to do a time-consuming layout. We found a few and eliminated one in particular that could occur when changing class names. This can result in a big performance boost for some pages.

Granular custom builds: Our modularity is now defined by AMD, and it is easier to build small subsets of the library when space is at a premium. If you want to know more, we’ve hidden the details in the README file where nobody ever looks.

Lower startup overhead: The new modularity and avoidance of forced layouts led us to refactor our feature detects so that they run the first time they’re needed. If you never call the API needing that feature detect, you never run that code. Previously we ran all feature detects when the page loaded, that led to delays that were generally small, but added up–especially on mobile platforms.

Published on npm: Our releases will now be published on npm so that you can use them with node or browserify. Both the 1.x and 2.x branches are available on npm, but remember that only the 2.x branch is supported to run in node.

Published on Bower: We’re now using Bower for our internal dependency management including Sizzle, so you’ll see jQuery releases on Bower as soon as they’re available.

Some people have asked about supporting other package managers inside the jQuery library, but we’ve decided to only support the two that we use internally at the moment. There are more than a dozen package/dependency managers, it would be handy if they all could agree on a single format for projects to publish information. We don’t want the package manager’s overhead to be pushed off to individual projects like jQuery.

Although the glamor always seems to be in the new stuff, we don’t like to ignore the bugs and inconveniences that people have run across while using the last version. We worked hard to knock down our bug list and tackled quite a few of them. We even fixed a bug that only occurs in IE6, better late than never!

Sourcemap changes

This release does not contain the sourcemap comment in the minified file. Sourcemaps have proven to be a very problematic and puzzling thing to developers, spawning hundreds of confused developers on forums like StackOverflow and causing some to think jQuery itself was broken.

We’ll still be generating and distributing sourcemaps, but you will need to add the appropriate sourcemap comment at the end of the minified file if the browser does not support manually associating map files (currently, none do). If you generate your own jQuery file using the custom build process, the sourcemap comment will be present in the minified file and the map is generated; you can either leave it in and use sourcemaps or edit it out and ignore the map file entirely.

We hope to bring back and improve sourcemap support in the future, but at the moment neither the design nor the implementation seem suited for situations like jQuery’s, where there are widely distributed files on CDNs. We’d like sourcemaps (and browsers supporting them) to gracefully handle situations like file renaming or missing files. See our bug ticket for more information.

Core

Event

Maintaining an open source project as big as jQuery requires the use of various software and services. Two of the products we rely on and enjoy the most are GitHub and WordPress.

We’ve been using and loving Git and GitHub for years now. The community collaboration has been phenomenal. We’ve seen a massive uptick in community-provided bug fixes, refactors, new features, etc. Even within the team, the services provided by GitHub have provided a huge productivity boost. Forks and pull requests provide a great mechanism for sharing code and peer code reviews. The interface renders almost every file exactly how we want it to, especially Markdown. The API and service hooks provide a great way to automate various tasks.

Even longer than we’ve been using GitHub, we’ve been using WordPress to manage our various web sites. We have a surprisingly large number of them. Between project sites, API documentation, tutorials, contribution guides, events, and organization sites, the number of web sites we maintain rivals the number of code projects we maintain. WordPress provides tools which make managing this many sites with a common brand almost as simple as maintaining just one site with shared users, theme inheritance, and a great plugin architecture, providing even more hooks than GitHub.

The missing pieces

Unfortunately, our WordPress experience lacked all the collaboration tools and workflow we love. Only a few people had access to edit content, and collaboration without pull requests is painful. Managing content on api.jquery.com was an even bigger hassle because of our XML based workflow, which the WordPress editor clearly wasn’t designed for.

While GitHub has tons of tools that we love, and they even have GitHub Pages, it lacked the infrastructure we need for managing our site content. GitHub Pages have no built-in features and can’t have any server-side processing. Features like search and commenting either need to be added per site via client-side JavaScript or can’t be implemented at all.

Bringing it all together

In order to resolve these issues, we decided to find a way to bring these two products together and get the best of both worlds. It started off pretty bumpy, but we managed to do just that! Things started to really pick up when we got the support of WordPress’ Lead Developer Andrew Nacin. Nacin played a key role in getting our new infrastructure set up and ensuring we were using WordPress as efficiently as possible. With his help, and the help of a few new projects – such as node-wordpress, grunt-wordpress, and grunt-jquery-content – we were able to build exactly what we wanted.

We now manage our WordPress theme in jquery-wp-content, and the content for all of our sites are stored and managed in individual repositories on GitHub. Storing the content of each site on GitHub gives us all the benefits of tracking tasks in issues, discussions on pull requests, visual diffs for changes, etc. The content of each page is generated by grunt-jquery-content from HTML, XML or Markdown source depending on the repository. This content is then synced to WordPress using grunt-wordpress. Just like our code, all of our site content is open source and released under the terms of the MIT license, with the exception of our branding which is not licensed for use by others.

We’re now powering a dozen and a half sites with this new process, averaging 20 contributors per site. Our most popular sites for community contribution are learn.jquery.com which is nearing triple digits and api.jquery.com which currently has 50 contributors. We’re averaging 40 pull requests per site as well, showing just how beneficial this new workflow has been for the team and the community. If you’d like to join in on this community effort, you can read more about our process and how to get involved on our contribution site and help make jQuery better for everyone.

As I sit here in New York City in the wake of a nor’easter that just hammered the, uh, Northeast, it’s hard not for me to be excited for the next jQuery Conference, which is just three short weeks away in sunny San Diego, California. So excited, in fact, that I wanted to take a couple minutes to bring you up to speed on what we’ve got in store for you the week of February 10th!

That’s What I’m Talking About

If you missed our announcements over at @jqcon over the past few weeks, we’ve rolled out a great lineup of speakers, who will be presenting on an array of subjects covering jQuery and beyond. We’ll be hosting our first-ever guest keynotes, as we proudly welcome chat.meatspac.es creatorbro herself, Edna Piranha, who’ll share both the history and the future of the web’s first ephemeral, WebRTC-powered, animated-GIF-generating chat service, and Scott Hanselman, who’ll discuss JavaScript’s impact on application architecture and its growing appeal as a compilation target. As usual, project leads Dave Methvin and Scott González will start off each day with keynotes updating you on what’s new in jQuery, jQuery UI and jQuery Mobile development.

We’re back to our familiar two-track lineup, and this time we’ve curated them in order to help you get a well-rounded look at JavaScript and front-end development tools and techniques that you can go back home and use. As always, you’re of course free to pick and choose between talks in both tracks.

First up is our Fundamentals track. With talks ranging from debugging and scope to the basics of testing (and automating that testing), the Fundamentals track is meant to help introduce and reinforce common and emerging concepts and practices that are integral to building successful web apps today. It’s far from a refresher course, however, and also includes subjects like how to secure client side apps, responsive design, and how to organize jQuery and JavaScript applications to keep them lean and mean.

Next door, we’ll have our Code For Thought track, a wide-ranging exploration of a breadth of topics related to the ever-changing world of web application development with JavaScript. We’ll talk about how jQuery 2.0 and its modular build system make jQuery an even more viable candidate for even low-bandwidth situations, and how you can apply performance improvements in jQuery Mobile 1.4 to your own applications. We’ll spend plenty of time looking at newer technologies, including Firefox OS, new HTML5 speech APIs, and Node.js. And we’ll dive deep, discussing advanced subjects like implementing code coverage analysis, building your own tools, writing third-party JavaScript apps, and why jQuery is still an incredibly useful tool even as the browser landscape has improved over the last few years.

With over 30 talks, this is only a sampling of the speakers and subjects on offer. We’re sure jQuery San Diego will have more than a little bit of something for everyone; head on over to review the whole program to see the full abstracts for all of our sessions.

The Roost Boost

This year, we’re partnering with Bocoup to extend the festivities, bringing you a pre-conference training event in the form of Roost, a two-day intensive course on crafting modern web applications taught by Ben Alman, Irene Ros, Mike Pennisi, and Bob Holt. Roost is targeted at developers who already know JavaScript, jQuery, HTML, and CSS, and are looking to understand how to develop a better workflow for building, testing, and maintaining their applications and incorporate technologies like Backbone, RequireJS, Stylus, and more. You can check out the full training curriculum and schedule to find out exactly what’s planned.

We Like, We Like To Party

We’re happy to announce that we’re hosting a conference party at Fiesta de Reyes after the first day of talks, February 12. Located just a trolley ride away from the conference in the heart of San Diego’s Old Town, it’s a great spot and we’re looking forward to having a few hours to relax with the community – food and drinks are on us!

Brought To You By

We’d be remiss if we didn’t give a shout out to the sponsors who are stepping up to help us put together a great jQuery Conference: Diamond sponsor WordPress, Platinum sponsor MaxCDN, Gold sponsors Bocoup & BrowserStack, and Silver sponsors WalmartLabs & New Relic. Thanks! (We’re still welcoming sponsors – if you’d like to have your company be a part of #jqcon, please get in touch!)

Student Discount

We’re glad to be able to offer a discount to current students. Anyone from kindergarten right on up through graduate school may use coupon code jqstudentSD14 to save $100 off a ticket to jQuery San Diego or a combo ticket to jQCon and Roost. Though we know the discount is modest, this is the first time we’ve been able to offer a student discount of any kind, so we hope it helps. Please be advised that if you use this discount, you’ll need to show a valid student ID at registration.

I Read This Whole Blog Post, What’s In It For Me?

Fifty bucks! No joke – register now for jQuery Conference, Roost, or both using discount code jqblog50 to save an $50 on your ticket!

We’ve been working hard to make our trip to the west coast the best #jqcon yet, and hope you’ll be able to be part of the whole week. Check out the conference site for more on our program and speakers, lodging, and to buy your tickets. If you have any questions, always feel free to get in touch with us on Twitter or via e-mail.

We’re just about ready for the final release of jQuery 1.11 and 2.1! Before we release, we’d like you to sanity-check our work. It will save us both a bunch of work if you check things out now, rather than waiting for a release. If something’s not right, we can fix it before millions of people have to deal with it!

We’ve also published the files on npm for those of you using that for dependency management. This version should work properly with browserify.

This version is mainly about fixing bugs and supporting more dependency managers, so you shouldn’t expect to see compatibility issues if you’ve already migrated to 1.9 or higher. But that’s why we’re putting out a release candidate, we want this to be as stable as possible. If you do see problems, please report them at bugs.jquery.com.

Core

Event

Most web developers think about jQuery in terms of its roots, as a library that tries to bring sanity to a disparate set of APIs and quirks that vary from browser to browser. Although that’s one of the things that jQuery was built to do, and still does, it’s not the only thing. jQuery defines a useful API that makes it as easy to work with one element as it does for a dozen. jQuery shortens verbose DOM API names and removes tedious boilerplate code, making it easier to write and to read code. jQuery adds functionality beyond the standard APIs for the work that web developers often need to do.

In short, jQuery isn’t just an API repairman for browsers. To the extent that we need to fix problems, we do it. But we’re even more interested in getting browsers to fix their problems, and in shaping future standards to avoid problems, so native APIs will work properly from the start. Then we can all build useful functionality on top of that solid foundation.

jQuery team members bring plenty of real-world experience that guide standards in the right direction. The earliest example of this is the querySelectorAll method, where John Resig pointed out that the implementation wasn’t quite what JavaScript developers needed. Unfortunately in the case of querySelectorAll, it was too late to do anything to fix the problems.

How jQuery Can Shape Standards

In order to provide input into emerging standards, the jQuery Foundation joined the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and ECMA International last year. In fact, it’s one of the main reasons the Foundation was formed. W3C and ECMA members tend to be representatives of the companies that make browsers and commercial software. We believe that we bring the voice of the rank-and-file web developer to the standards process.

Yehuda Katz and Rick Waldron have been active in the ECMA TC39 group, which defines the language officially known as EcmaScript but that we know as JavaScript. Rick’s excellent meeting notes can give you an inside view of the deliberations that go on during their in-person meetings.

Scott González and Kris Borchers have been working to refine the Pointer Events standard. It brings simplicity, regularity, and sanity to the handling of pointer technologies so that developers don’t have inconsistent (and conflicting!) event models for touch and mouse. During the transition, developers will be dealing with three pointer models–mouse, touch, and pointer. jQuery and jQuery UI want to simplify this transition to the standard.

Julian Aubourg has been participating on revisions to the XMLHttpRequest standard, a position for which he’s been battle-tested by jQuery’s $.ajax implementation. Knowing all the problems that jQuery has worked around provides him with experience to avoid the same problems in the future.

Scott González and TJ VanToll have been active in helping to define HTML5 input types such as <input type=”date”>, providing practical input based on experience with jQuery UI. TJ’s talk at the Portland jQuery Conference does a great job of covering the pitfalls of using HTML5 input types today, and emerging standards like Web Components that could make things easier for web developers.

The jQuery Foundation is also a strong advocate of accessibility; we want to make it easy for web developers to reach all users including those with vision or motor impairments. The W3C addresses those issues through the Web Accessibility Initiative, and specifically with Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA). jQuery UI widgets are incorporating ARIA attributes, and Foundation member Deque Systems has sponsored several events on jQuery accessibility issues.

Finally, we coordinate and pass along bugs reported to jQuery that are due to standards violations in a particular browser. With most browsers updating every few months, it often doesn’t make sense for jQuery to incorporate large and complex bug fixes for temporary problems. But we’re committed to getting them fixed by the browser makers as soon as possible.

A Standards-Driven jQuery Future

jQuery isn’t a highly opinionated framework that demands control over all the DOM. In most cases you can (and often should) use the DOM APIs alongside jQuery. That was always the intended design; you can see it in aspects like the this object inside an event handler being a DOM element, not a jQuery object. About the only place where jQuery requires control is when elements in the DOM are replaced via methods like .html() or removed with a method like .empty(), so that any associated jQuery data can be cleared out.

The jQuery Foundation wants standards-based APIs and cutting-edge JavaScript features to be usable directly by developers. The good news is that the community is making good progress on that goal, and jQuery team members are helping through our participation in the standards process. Yet the continuing evolution of web standards and practices, combined with a vibrant third-party ecosystem of plugins and knowledge, still provide compelling reasons to use jQuery. Web developers deserve to have the best of both.

In 2013, MaxCDN joined the jQuery Foundation and stepped up to provide Content Delivery Network (CDN) services for the jQuery CDN at code.jquery.com. Files can now be requested through both HTTP and HTTPS (SSL) protocols, either to download to your own servers or to use directly on production web sites. MaxCDN’s infrastructure can reliably deliver jQuery files through a worldwide high-speed collection of servers to minimize round-trip time.

Why a CDN is Useful to Developers

The obvious benefit is that the MaxCDN network is much faster than the average server, and geographically distributed so that round-trip times are kept low. Yet there is another subtle benefit. Many web sites simply serve up all their content (HTML, CSS, scripts, images, and other assets) from the same domain. This can create a bottleneck on both the browser and the server. Downloading content from multiple domains, known as domain sharding, can improve performance. Just remember that as with any good thing, going overboard is a bad idea. Some research shows that just two domains may be the sweet spot. Use a tool like WebPageTest to test your site to get the best results.

Why a CDN is Useful to jQuery Projects

jQuery projects serve out a huge number of bytes, especially on days when a project makes a new release. When developers rush to download the latest version, we want to be able to handle the load. GitHub does a great job of supporting our development cycle and working project files, but it is not designed to serve up billions of copies of our production files. Google and Microsoft also provide CDNs, but it can take several days between the time a project makes a release and the time the files appear on those CDNs. Third-party CDNs also have their own rules about which files can be placed on the CDN, for example they don’t post pre-release versions. The jQuery CDN allows us full control over timing and content.

Serving Billions of Files, Trillions of Bytes

We thought we were serving a lot of files, but some statistics from MaxCDN really drive home the point. In the last five months of 2013, the CDN served more than 82 billion files, exceeding 3.6 petabytes. We sent out enough bytes to completely fill 3,269 1-terabyte disk drives! An average day on the CDN has us serving up about 20 terabytes of data.

Here are the ten most popular files requested from the CDN:

#

File name

Hits(billion)

Size(terabytes)

1

jquery-latest.js

6.36

404.65

2

jquery-1.9.1.min.js

5.93

193.96

3

jquery-1.7.2.min.js

4.95

154.50

4

jquery-latest.min.js

4.45

116.08

5

/ui/1.10.3/jquery-ui.js

4.18

484.58

6

jquery-1.9.1.js

2.45

178.54

7

jquery-1.10.1.min.js

2.27

71.62

8

jquery-1.7.1.min.js

2.26

78.05

9

jquery-1.4.2.min.js

2.07

39.80

10

/ui/1.10.3/themes/smoothness/jquery-ui.css

1.55

9.83

There are some encouraging signs here. Some of the most popular files are the minified files, as they should be for a production web site. It’s also encouraging that recent versions of jQuery Core (1.9.1 and 1.10.1) are high up on the list. That means a lot of jQuery developers are keeping up with the features and bug fixes we’ve been adding.

The most commonly requested file is jquery-latest.js, which automatically updates whenever the jQuery Core team releases a new version. Developers should never use jquery-latest.js or jquery-latest.min.js on a production site, it is primarily meant for testing. Similarly, the full jQuery UI build at position 5 is the latest version, but that file may not be a good fit for production sites needing only a few jQuery UI widgets. A minified copy with just the needed widgets can be built on the download builder page.

Counting on the CDN

Thanks to MaxCDN’s contribution, the jQuery Foundation has a content delivery network that offers reliable high-speed access to all of our project files. The files at code.jquery.com serve as the official repository for all jQuery project releases. You can either download the file for local use, or reference our domain directly from your own web pages to take advantage of the CDN and domain sharding.

The year 2013 was an incredibly exciting one for jQuery. As jQuery celebrates eight years of supporting web developers, it’s time for our annual review. I’m pleased to say that we achieved a lot in 2013 and have some great plans for 2014!

New Leadership

In November, Kris Borchers became Executive Director of the jQuery Foundation as successor to Richard Worth. Kris has been a jQuery Foundation board member and a long-time jQuery contributor, so he understands the mission of the Foundation well. We welcome Kris, and thank Richard for his work in shepherding the Foundation through its first full year of existence.

Continuing Growth

It seems impossible to believe there are still web sites that don’t use jQuery, but the statistics at builtwith.com show there are fewer and fewer of them. jQuery’s core library is used by more than 61 percent of the top 100,000 sites, up 10 percent from last year. Growth is also strong in other jQuery Foundation projects such as jQuery UI, which is now used by nearly one-fifth of top-10,000 web sites.

New Environments

jQuery is also used in a lot of places that can’t be identified through a web crawl. You’ll find jQuery anywhere web technologies are used, not just the public Internet. That includes Google Chrome add-ons, Mozilla XUL apps and Firefox extensions, Firefox OS apps, Chrome OS apps, Windows 8 Store apps, BlackBerry 10 WebWorks apps, PhoneGap/Cordova apps, Node.js, and even the Sony PlayStation 4. By supporting these technologies, we’ve made it possible to take advantage of jQuery knowledge in many places other than just browsers and web pages.

Future-Oriented

In January 2013, we released jQuery 1.9; then jQuery 2.0 was released in April. These two versions dumped old APIs that were making jQuery bigger, slower, and harder to use. jQuery 2.0 went a step further and dropped support for environments that don’t support newer standards, such as Internet Explorer before version 9. From an API standpoint, the two behave identically, though; web developers can update to the 2.x branch whenever those older versions of IE are no longer important to their web pages or apps.

Backwards-Compatible

We knew that removing some old functionality from jQuery core could make migration slow and difficult; after all, a lot of code on web sites was written years ago and the people who wrote it are long gone. That’s why we created the jQuery Migrate plugin to identify code that was using the features we removed. Better than that, it allowed most of that old code to continue to work by shimming in the old behavior. It’s a great tool for keeping a site running while things are being updated, although we don’t advise using it for a long-term fix.

jQuery Served Your Way

With jQuery being used in so many environments, we want to make sure it fits with their workflows and conventions. So, we’re adapting by making jQuery available on both the npm and Bower package managers. This makes it easy for just about any JavaScript-based project to keep jQuery dependencies up to date. Last year’s refactor of jQuery core into small modules also lets developers create a custom build that removes features a project doesn’t need, to reduce the download size.

Keeping it Simple

We haven’t forgotten, however, that most developers keep things simple and just include a copy of the standard jQuery build using a <script> tag. So in 2013 we upgraded our content delivery network (CDN) thanks to a generous donation from MaxCDN. The jQuery CDN is now better than ever and supports the https protocol for delivering all files.

Advocating for Developer Needs

jQuery’s use of a convenient and browser-independent layer around the cumbersome DOM interfaces is one reason for its popularity. As Simon St. Laurent put it, “jQuery is how the web routes around broken API design.” But we don’t want the DOM API repair business to be our full-time line of work. People should be continuing to use jQuery because it’s a powerful way to implement designs and provides a vibrant ecosystem of useful plugins, not because the native DOM APIs are broken, verbose, or inconsistent. That’s why we participate in the standards process through bodies such as the W3C and ECMA.

Let’s Keep Innovating!

Over the next few days, posts on this blog will be counting the ways that the jQuery Foundation is improving the web developer community, in keeping with our mission. If you see something that interests you, we invite you to get in touch with us and participate!

The jQuery Foundation is pleased to announce that the third annual jQuery UK will take place on May 16, 2014 in Oxford, UK. This event is organised by White October Events.

jQuery UK is the UK’s largest front-end developer conference. Over one day and three tracks, pioneers of the world’s favourite JavaScript framework and wider industry experts will deliver technical content to inspire front-end and full stack developers to do more in the browser and beyond.